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Measuring Life

Beautiful essay about a son dealing with his father's hypergraphia (in a sense) after his death - fulfilling the last wish of making all the writing available online. As someone who feels compelled to write and treats the act of writing as therapeutic, I can understand why this man had to write no matter who got the point of his writing. 

My father needed a great deal of space, but now he takes up almost none. Almost. Death is a lossy process, but something always remains.  

A person's writing life filling 7 gigabytes is big and completely trivial at once depending on how you are counting. That is a mind-boggling number of words but a 32 GB flash-drive which is the size of a cigarette lighter costs under $5. If that is your perspective - this man's entire sense of self is contained in about a fourth of that drive and all he had to say for himself to the world costs less than a dollar to hold. The average size of a video game is 30 to 120 GB. 

So one could argue that this man's life held a lot less meaning than any video game out there. Call of Duty would be seen as 20 times more meaningful than the entirety of his life if measured by the number of bits it takes express such meaning. Made me wonder about the futility of words written with no one in mind and no one that it would reach and connect with. Notwithstanding some of us cannot help ourselves - we do have to write our thing. 

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